By Nick Heath, 24 June 2009 12:24
NEWS
With predictions that a £50bn cut in public services spending is needed by 2020, senior Whitehall figures have indicated that they're open to an increased offshoring of government IT.
According to Alexis Cleveland, director of transformational government for the Cabinet Office, sending some areas of tech work abroad could result in cheaper and better-quality IT services.
Asked how much scope there is to increase offshoring within central government, Cleveland said: "With legacy systems and a lot of back room operations it could be a fairly high proportion."
"With modulised elements of code and the like I would see a great cost reduction and improvement in quality through using offshoring," she told silicon.com at the Government Computing Live event.
Andrew Gay, acting CIO for the Ministry of Justice, said there is scope for more work to be carried out offshore in his department, giving the example of application development for a system such as the C-Nomis offender case management system for prisons.
"We spent a lot of money on the development base for C-Nomis," he added.
He said, however, that any new work being sent offshore would have to be carefully scrutinised: "There are some government departments taking development offshore, there is some non-essential personal data that is hosted offshore but there is not a government policy on it, nor do I think the government would do a big policy on it at the moment. It would have to be judged on its individual merits," he told silicon.com at the recent GovNet Modernising Justice Through IT conference.
The comments come ahead of a report into how much public sector work should be offshored, which cross-government group the Strategic Supply Board will present to the CIO Council at the end of next month.
Any government commitment to further offshoring could help meet targets set out under the Operational Efficiency Programme (OEP), the recent report by ex-Logica CEO Martin Read that sets out the public sector need to use shared services and outsourcing to help it save £7.2bn per year on its IT and back office systems.
Sureyya Cansoy, head of public sector programmes for UK IT trade association Intellect which was consulted for the OEP report, said there was some confusion among public sector IT suppliers about how much work could be offshored and welcomed any guidance on what types of work could be carried out abroad.
"Clarity around which parts of government can be offshored would be very useful," she said.
Whitehall already offshores a limited amount of work, including some back office operations under the NHS Shared Business Services Centre run by Steria and the Department of Health. The joint venture provides back office services to more than 100 trusts and offshores about 60 per cent of its work to India.
The centre's performance has been mixed: despite having signed up one quarter of all NHS trusts, it's also about three years behind its target of having 40 per cent of trusts on board and that is not expected to break even until this year.
Public sector union PCS however has raised concerns over the impact of offshoring on the quality and security of public services.
"Once you start offshoring the lines of accountability in terms of how data is handled, how the contract is managed and how it is delivered become diminished," a PCS spokesman said.
"People need to ask themselves do they want public services driven by a race to the bottom in terms of costs."
Comments
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1. drew stephenson
Joined up government again here. Tech jobs are apparently our future, so we'll offshore more tech jobs. hmmm.
I have no problem with private companies doing this, they live and die by how well they can serve their customers and manage their money and the end customer is free to pick and choose what they use and don't.
As a consumer of public services i don't have that choice, and i reckon the impact of offshoring these jobs could easily turn out to be false economy when the complete picture is assessed.
2. anonymous
Gordon Brown's UK Jobs for UK workers is laughable. Esp. if UK Govermnent PLC is now going to be one of the cheif offenders.
I thought these sorts of Technology Driven jobs were what was supposed to be the saviour of this country ??
If they want to save money, they should stop p155ing it up the wall on poorly scoped, poorly implemented, poorly managed Procuremment driven defence or IT initiatives like the NHS trainwreck.
3. Charles Smith
Spend UK taxpayer money on foreign imports rather than use UK based workforce?
Sounds like par for the course! Next the Government will be bemoaning the lack of skilled IT personnel in the UK.
4. karen challinor
we are going to offshore government IT ?
possibly put the development of systems that could handle top secret or sensitive or even just mission critical information into the hands of a foreign power ?
please don't tell me it can't happen, ministers are going to assess each case and make a decision and ministers don't have very good track records on these things
then we get to the issue of pouring billions of pounds of public money out of the national coffers and directly into the national coffers of a foreign power while the country is in the midst of a recession
the self same recession which is being used as an excuse for the cost cutting that brought about the offshoring suggestion ?
this is supposed to make things better ?
how ?
I'm sorry this isn't a more coherent argument but I'm just a little stunned
5. Richard
Amazing: Almost 5 million people out of work...
...and the current UK government "exports" more jobs.
6. Mark Young
Karen, I totally agree.
Every penny off-shored is lost to our economy and in a recession is a scandalous waste.
Every penny spent here recycles numerous times through the local economy eventually ending up taken as taxes to be respent by the government of the day.
Given the double whammy of throwing money overseas and paying unemployment benefit, surely it must make economic sense to fund local jobs.
Being cynical I don't expect politicians to take the whole picture into account.
I think politicians, if they were turkeys, would vote for Christmas!! That is how it looks to me.
7. Annoyed
Here is a cost saving idea... lets offshore the government!!
It will be cheaper and less corrput... the offshore centre will have to meet SLAs or face fines...